Mad Hattery, a blog I find hugely entertaining,
commented on the Sultan of Brunei's birthday banquet:
One of the annual foreign royal guests at the Sultan of Brunei’s big birthday bash is Princess Basma of Jordan, the younger sister of the late King Hussein and the aunt of the current king, Abdullah II. She’s the woman all the way on the left of this photo.
Basma’s tiara is a really interesting diamond piece — from a distance, it almost looks like a floral tiara, but up close, it’s more of an intricate abstract pattern of circles and swirls, with a top element that almost looks like the Prince of Wales feather emblem. It’s stunning! (And Basma has grown her hair out a bit in recent years, which sets of the tiara really well. Love it!)
Maybe I shouldn't have, and I hope the Mad Hattery Blogger won't find it undue criticism of her writings, but here is my comment:
I enjoy your blog very much, so please take this as constructive criticism. I don't know whether you're a monarchist or rather not, but it doesn't really matter. For a monarchist, the monarch derives his authority from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the Ten Commandments. That is not the God to which Muslims pray. They say they do (they WOULD say that, wouldn't they?), but they don't. Therefore they all have as much royal authority as "Emperor" Bokassa, even if some of them (as this member of the Hashemite family does) may emulate Western ways. But even if that doesn't mean anything to you and you see all that glitter as part of a huge society bash (which it is becoming more and more anyway), I still object to that kind of commentatorship because you are, I am sure unintentionally, helping to make us in the West comfortable with Islamic sharia law. While I am writing this, in Iran another woman is about to be stoned to death under sharia law. Maybe they don't stone people to death in Brunei, it is even one of the rare Muslim countries that allows other religions to exist as Dhimmies, but that may change at the turn of the Sultan's hand. If we start oh-ing and ah-ing over the deeply misogynist sharia-conform dresses of those women, even though they are bedecked with priceless baubles, and fail to see them as what they are, namely symbols of a cruel death cult out to rule the world, we have made another step in the direction of our self-disposal.
I have commented on it here: Seeping-in Sharia.
Keep up the good work! Your blog is a real treat in any other respect.
Frankly, I don't enjoy the publicly displayed
bare thighs of royal princesses either, but sharia modesty, which is based on fear and hatred of women, is rather not modesty at all, but inverted obscenity.
